{"id":38261,"date":"2026-10-05T05:00:34","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T09:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=38261"},"modified":"2026-10-04T22:55:49","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T02:55:49","slug":"winter-bah-humbug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2026\/10\/05\/winter-bah-humbug\/","title":{"rendered":"Winter, Bah, Humbug!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dunwich is settling into fall.\u00a0 We had a week of rain and wind.\u00a0 We had one day of summer where it reached the mid-eighties and now it\u2019s back in the sixties.\u00a0 The clown parade of weather men and girls have done their best to confuse their forecasts beyond human understanding but I could glean that we have about a week or two before the first real frost.<\/p>\n

So today I went to store away the pool furniture and accoutrements.\u00a0 And while I was inside the pool fence, I saw a female preying mantis trying to warm up enough to remember how to trap insects.\u00a0 But there really aren\u2019t many insects left.\u00a0 Well, there are but I think the mantis is waiting for the bees to frequent the flowers that she was stationed under.\u00a0 And the bees were nowhere to be found today.\u00a0 At least not on that side of the yard.\u00a0 There was a grasshopper hiding under a branch about three feet away from the mantis but it might as well have been on the dark side of the moon as far as the predator was concerned.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Me and My Shadow<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I took some photos of both.\u00a0 I was temped to catch the grasshopper and try to lure the mantis into grabbing it with her claws.\u00a0 But I remember last year when I \u201cbrought\u201d a mantis in at the end of the season.\u00a0 It died in about two days.\u00a0 It was like something out of a 1930s Universal Monster movie.\u00a0 I had delved into things that \u201cMan was not meant to meddle in.\u201d\u00a0 So, I waved goodbye to the grasshopper and the mantis and got back to the work Camera Girl wanted me to meddle with.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday the battery in my car died and Camera Girl loaned me her car until the AAA guy came the next day.\u00a0 I gave them the make and model over the phone and they said they had the right battery so I expected a quick replacement.\u00a0 But the gods conspired to complicate my day.\u00a0 It seems that Toyota uses a special smaller battery to fit in the crowded footprint of the engine compartment.\u00a0 So, the poor guy had to travel almost an hour in each direction back and forth to his shop before finally finishing the job.\u00a0 Two hundred and forty bucks for the darned thing.\u00a0 Gee, I remember when a battery was fifty, sixty bucks.\u00a0 Well that probably says as much about how old I am as it says about the unbearable expensiveness of everything.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m being greedy.\u00a0 The thing lasted seven years.\u00a0 That\u2019s a pretty good battery life and at least it had the good grace to give up the ghost in my garage so I didn\u2019t have to wait around in the middle of nowhere hoping for the tow truck guy to rescue me.\u00a0 But I guess it\u2019s really the time of the year I should thank.\u00a0 Last week was the first large drop in the ambient temperature since last year.\u00a0 And that change in temperature probably decreased the voltage of the old battery below the minimum needed to crank the engine.\u00a0 So as unnatural as it is for me to be grateful for the end of summer, I guess I should be.\u00a0 Bah!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dunwich is settling into fall.\u00a0 We had a week of rain and wind.\u00a0 We had one day of summer where it reached the mid-eighties and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3366,1263],"tags":[3341,456],"class_list":["post-38261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-in-dunwich","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-dunwich","tag-fall"],"yoast_head":"\nWinter, Bah, Humbug! - Orion's Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2026\/10\/05\/winter-bah-humbug\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Winter, Bah, Humbug! 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